Nammalvar

2. Nammalvar's Life

Of the life of Nammalvar, as of the lives of the other Alvars,
the chief sources are Divya Suri Charitam in Sanskrit by one
Garudavahana Panditar, a contemporary of Sri Ramanuja,* and Guru Parampara
Prabhavam, (the Six Thousand), a work in Sanskritised Tamil
prose by Pinpazhagiya Perumal Jeer. There are a few other works1 which give Nammalvar's life
and though there are some differences of minor detail among them,
they agree in the main. The story of Nammalvar's life as now
current in Ramanuja Vaishnava tradition may be summed up as
follows:

Maran, later known as Nammalvar and by other names like Satagopa,
Parankusa, etc., was born as the avatara of Senai Mudaliar

Nammalvar
Alvar Tirunagari
(Tirukkuruhur)

(God's Chief of Hosts). His father Kariyar belonged to
Tirukkuruhur on the banks of the Tamraparni in the Tirunelveli
district. For the first sixteen years of his life, Maran remained
without food and drink, with his eyes closed, under a tamarind
tree (the avatara, it is believed, of Adisesha, the
serpent on which God, Sri Narayana, reclines), near the temple of
Lord Adinatha at Tirukkuruhur. He opened his eyes and spoke for
the first time when one Madurakavi, who later on became his
disciple, put a question to him: "When what is little is born in
the dead, what will it eat and where will it lie?" Nammalvar
answered the question thus: "It will eat the dead and lie on it."

Even after this, Nammalvar never left the shade of the tamarind
tree. He remained there singing his hymns. All the deities of the
hundred and eight divya desas (the divine shrines) came to
Tirukkuruhur, it is said, to give him "darsan". When he had
finished the four works attributed to him, the call came and he
joined the feet of the Lord for which he had yearned all his
life.

It will be seen from this brief account that Nammalvar's life as
it was lived in the light of common day, with all the details of
the earth that he touched, is not available to us. The first
account of it in Sanskrit was written a few centuries after him,
and according to its claim, more than nearly forty centuries
after him. It is no doubt a theological if psychologically true
version, for by the time it was written, Nammalvar had been
accepted by Vaishnavas of the south as a saint, as the saint of
saints at whose word the transcendent state opens to man.

Modern biographical and historical research trying to get at what
it would call the facts of Nammalvar's life stands baulked. Time
has swallowed the factual details and what is now presented is
the idealised account given in Divya Suri Charitam and Guru
Parampara Prabhavam. This account, though it may not satisfy
seekers of Boswellian documentation, is true to the inward life
-- and that is what matters -- so variedly and movingly recorded
in Nammalvar's words. The long years of his silence and his
detachment from all things earthly which are the most significant
points in the traditional account of Nammalvar conform to the
experience of mystics the world over. The first years of his life
were spent, we may well believe, in the search for the `God
within' in a single-pointed contemplation that by a divine
dispensation came to him from birth. The miracle of his life lies
here. When he emerged from this in-drawn state, he had touched
the Ultimate. His works chronicle this as also the various stages
of his journey to God. That journey, as his words reveal, is
marked by the initial alienation from the earth, the beginning of
the search for significance, the darkness that sets in on the
way, its sudden removal and as sudden return, the passion and
agony of the seeking and the joy of realisation, in fact all the
states through which one passes.

"When that which came from out the boundless deep
Turns again home."

Since Nammalvar spoke only after the first sixteen years of his
life, if we consider this period of silence as occupied by his
search for Reality, we have to infer that portions of his works
were a turning back and a recollection, a fresh experience, to
change Wordsworth's phrasing, recollected in the tranquillity of
realisation.2

1 The other
works are: Upadesa Ratna Malai by Sri Manavala Mamuni, Desika
Prabhandam by Sri Vedanta Desika, Guru Parampara Prabhavam
(the Three Thousand) by Sri Brahmatantra Swatantra Jeer,
Prapannamrutam by Sri Anantacharya, Peria Tirumudi Adaivu by
Sri Kandadai Appan, Koil Olugu which records the history of the
temple at Srirangam, etc. [Back]